


Happy Pills

by sad_comrade



Category: South Park
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Author is definitely not projecting, But It's Lowkey Bangin' So-, Cross-Posted on Wattpad, Depression, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Minor Character Death, Pining, Rating May Change, Substance Abuse, Tags May Change, There's a Playlist for this Fic but You Don't Really Have to Listen to It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:55:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23269549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sad_comrade/pseuds/sad_comrade
Summary: Craig was fine. He hated himself, but that was normal. He was normal.People whispered whenever they thought he wasn't listening. 'Freak,' they said. 'Psycho. Lock him up...' but that happens to everyone, right?Craig didn't need friends. Not then, and certainly not now. Well, he had friends once, but that was a long time ago. When friends stayed.They don't anymore...He had his pills, and that was all that mattered.Because when Craig took his pills, he had a friend.
Relationships: Craig Tucker/Tweek Tweak
Kudos: 9





	1. We Got Ourselves a Little Problem, Here

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the Spotify playlist link for anyone who's interested: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6jrtLXREhC72RoFgwTVCi5
> 
> I'm a sucker for fluff and just sweet ship fics in general, so writing angst is a very new and strange experience; just bear with me while I figure this out lmao-

Who knew The 'Incident' would end up helping Craig?

Well, not exactly. He still had to take his pills. He hated the pills. They didn't let him feel sad anymore. Just angry. All the time, and every day. Nobody was safe from his wrath, either. He lashed out whenever he wanted, provoked by nothing. Nothing but the stares. The stares and whispers. The stares and whispers and eyes.

Eyes. They followed him everywhere, relentlessly pushing at him. Pushing and poking until finally his walls gave out, and his rage swept over everyone. Over their eyes. Over their bodies. Over their hearts and minds and very beings. Until they were covered in it and drowning in his anger. In Craig's fury. Until the anger soaked into their own bodies, then festered into fear. The overpowering emotions, writhing around until they cracked, like Craig's had. Then everybody would know how he feels. 

They shouldn't have stared. Everyone knows it's rude. Everyone knows that, and yet, they still do. Ignoring the rules that were drilled into their heads since day one.

Don't stare.

Don't speak to strangers.

Don't speak out of turn.

Don't, don't, don't.

The don'ts were almost as bad as the staring. Always set in space, as if superimposed in the sky and hanging above everybody's head. Unspoken but always there. Everyone knew it, too, but if you stop to look. To just look up and check to see if you were doing the right thing- following all the rules- you get shunned. Because surely you already know the rules by now? You don't need a reminder, but if you do, then that's just too damn bad. Nobody's going to give you help, anyway. You're on your own, and if you can't handle that, then whose fault is that? It's just the way the world works, and the people who don't comply get left behind and forgotten.

Craig never needed anyone. He was always alone. He never needed other people. Well... not really. He didn't until he did, but not anymore. Somewhere during middle school, people started talking to him; it's all too hazy to remember now, but what he does know makes him look down upon his past self for being so stupid. Dumb enough to trust any rely on these people.

His old friends were nice. Amazing. Really, anything he could have ever hoped for. Token Black acted as the mom of the group, always worrying over everyone else and managing the fights when they broke out. Craig's sure that he wouldn't have survived middle school if it weren't for Token and his magic words' ability to put him at ease so effortlessly. Then there was Jimmy Valmer. He always managed to make their group burst into laughter; Jimmy wanted to be a comedian when they got out of their shitty landfil of a town. Craig thought the job would more than suit him. He always joked that Jimmy would be the best stand up comedian who can't stand. That would always result in a punch to the shoulder, but they all meant it in good fun. Finally, there was Clyde Donovan. Jesus, the guy was almost like a human puppy, all excitement and happiness, and, of course, a big crybaby as well. Still, he was wicked at Mario Cart. Still might be, but Craig wouldn't know.

Together, they formed a group, and it was amazing while it lasted. But, one day, it ended, as all good things eventually do. Suddenly, they just stopped talking to Craig. Well, no, not really. It was really more of a gradual thing; they slowly distanced themselves until all the interaction between the rest of the group and Craig was some uncomfortable catching of the others' eyes across the cafeteria. And, while Craig didn't always meet them, he knew that there was always some sort of suspicious or afraid stare directed toward him, whether they be from his old friends or other, less important, people. Their peircing gaze bore into his back, the side of his head, his very fucking essence. Well... The parts of him that weren't already infected by the pills. The pills that told him to be happy. They were supposed to make him happy, though Craig didn't want that. He only wanted to get away from it all.

The poisonous essence of the pills had seeped into him long ago, when they were first being forced down his throat, and now Craig was being trapped in it. In the vice-like grip of perscription medication, Craig struggled. Screaming, begging, pleading, anything to get him away. He had to leave, to get out of there. But the only way down is up, and left is right, except it really isn't, and everything's confusing, and Craig has to go. It needed to end, this downward spiral; the more pills he took, the farther down he's pulled. And Craig didn't like it. He had to get away. Away from not being able to feel anything but mad. 

He didn't like mad. He hated it, but that was the only thing he could feel. So mad would have to do. For now. But Craig was never satisfied for long. Only staved off just enough so he could find something else to want. To need.

He was a needy person. Craig knew it. He also knew that was one of the reasons for his severe lacking of friends. No, wait. That's not right... He had friends. He liked them. And they liked him too, once upon a time. Maybe... maybe they left because he had distanced himself from them first? Or... oh. Maybe- maybe -his friends' sudden distance at the start of high school was because of the first time he'd had a knife. You can say it was foreshadowing of what he'd become.

He doesn't like to think of that time, though. 

Yes, the chaos and panic and fear he had caused were undeniably sweet, but... the look of terror in his friend's eyes. It haunted him, sometimes visited him in his dreams on the worst of nights, though he'd give anything if it woudn't. If it'd just go away.

But that's how Craig liked it now. He liked it when people were afraid. When he turned his angry gaze on them, and they ran or nervously pretended to not see it. When people cowered, he felt in control, and the extreme rush he felt whenever he had power over others was something he felt couldn't be matched until recently.

His old friends never cowered, though. They would never run or avert their gaze. They just fixed him with their either sad (pitiful) or calculating (judgemental) eyes. He hated the way they didn't let him have the power he so very badly wanted. They saw him as an equal, if not less, and that was infuriating.

He's sure, however, that the rage he felt was because of the pills. Once he finds a way to stop taking the bad pills, his friends would come back to him. The pills were the ones who drove his friends away, not Craig. Craig did nothing, and yet the whole world was changing around him, whirling so fast that he got motion sick. Except the world wasn't moving fast. It was slow as ever. Creeping by like the hand of a clock during class, and all you can think is 'Hurry up, dammit'. It was just Craig's own fault everything was too much for him. Everything was his fault. It always was.

Nobody says it, but he knows. He's the reason his parents don't talk any more, though they still lived together. He's the reason the teachers never wanted to speak with him after class, though he'd done so much to provoke it. He's the reason a whole room falls silent when he slams the door open, eyes dark and menacing on his otherwise stony expression. It's all his fault. Why couldn't he change? Nobody likes him, so he needs to get better. He has to! Sure, he's tried before, but those previous attempts never work precisely because it's his own damn fault that he can't fix himself. He has to fucking change because everything's his fault, and nothing but him can fix that.

Wait...

No!

NO!

NO, NO, NO, NO-

IT WASN'T! IT WAS THE PILLS! THE PILLS, THEY MADE HIM HAVE THESE THOUGHTS! THEY WERE POISONING HIS MIND AND HAVING HIM BELIEVE THEIR LIES ABOUT HIMSELF! DON'T TAKE THEM DON'T TAKE THEM DON'T TAKE TH-

And then his mind quiets. His rushing blood flows away from his head as his vision clears. The pills are good. They're here to help. They make everything okay. He's going to have a good day. He will talk to his old friends, show them that he's changed. Show them that he needs-

He bites his dad's hand. The rough, calloused skin leaves a tangy and unpleasant taste in his mouth. Thomas Tucker hisses in pain and pulls it away, though the damage is already done; his job, served. Craig swallowed it. The evil pill. Though he was sure as hell going to make Thomas pay for forcing them down his throat like he did every morning. The biting is new though, and Craig likes the reaction it got.

The look of pain written clearly across his dad's face sparked something in his gut. Pain and fear and mistrust. His father's eyes are big and round, eyebrows raised before his expression washes over in sadness, and he pushes himself off the wooden chair. Thomas groans softly in time with the chair, and Craig can't help but humorlessly wonder how long it took them to rehearse that. 

The pills did that to him. They made him think stupid things instead of focusing on what's important. They made him mad and resentful. They pushed what few friends he had away. Not Craig. No, he would never do that. No, no, it was all the pills' fault. All their fault people looked at him for a few fleeting seconds before catching his eye and whipping their heads back away. Fear. That's what the pills were. They were fear. He swallowed them, and that's all he felt. He swallowed them, and that's what everyone else felt around him, too. 

If it weren't for the pills, Craig could probably be able to touch Him. Hold Him. Kiss and cuddle Him and call Him his.

The thought of Him...

It's the only thing that makes Craig truly happy, if only for a moment.


	2. I Hate the Image

Craig's peircing eyes follow his father's retreating form stumble from the room, defeated. Well, not quite. But enough so for Craig to take joy from the sullen expression on his face. When had he become like this, Craig fleetingly wonders. When had he begun to take pleasure from others' pain (truthfully, he did know when, but it hurt too much to think about); it'd never alleviate any of the unrelenting anger or sadness or resentment storming his mind. Maybe it's like some sort of twisted double-negative thing. Who knows. It's not like Craig cares that much. If people don't like it, that's their own damn fault.

He pushes himself up from the kitchen chair and ambles out of the room, mimicking what his father had done not a minute ago. Moodily shoving his hands deep inside his front hoodie pocket, Craig drags himself up the stairs to get ready for the day. Really, he wouldn't even bother with going to school- nobody would miss him, and he'd laugh if you mistakenly thought his parents would give a shit-, but there was one thing that kept Craig going. The thought of Him.

He swallows down the slight upward twitch of his lips at the memory of his only friend and instead pushes open the door that leads to his room. He refuses the urge to flit his gaze over to the inside of the painted white door as he enters; the horrid gashes of scratch marks remind him all too vividly of the long, terrifying nights where he caged himself in here, angry at the world and hysterical that maybe he'd be taken next. The scratches were a manifestation of his fear, desperate to rip out of him one way or another. Angry spots of splotchy burnt red at the end of the gashes bring back the dull thudding of pain that broken fingernails brought. Craig remembers the feeling of the walls closing in around him on those nights, squeezing until he couldn't breathe anymore. It's at times like those when he so desperately wants everything to stop- when he begs the constriction to squeeze out every last breath until he can't wake up, and it'll all be over- that the walls decist, opening up again and reminding him of how bitterly empty and dissapointing life truly is. You can never get what you want, even if everyone else around you wants it too.

Craig's well-worn, familiarly hollow reflection stares back at him through the stained and yellow-tinted mirror when he finally ambles into his bathroom. Glaring back at him is a long face, pulled into a permanent glare- his once handsomely tanned skin now unattractively marred with acne scars and violently dark streaks of eye bags. His nose drags down, long and thin and imposing over his face and ends in a cheery little point, so unlike the rest of his severe and angry features that it's almost ridiculous. Under his nose lie his equally thin lips, which are always pinched into a pensive and calculating line, severely chapped and cracking for lack of proper care. But at the center of it all, peircingly blue eyes cut through the image, drawing anyone's eye and demanding either your attention, your fear, or both. They're framed by sharp, black eyebrows which only furthers the illusion that Craig could easily pick you apart by your every flaw just from how he looks at you.

He hates it.

Hates the hollowness of it all; hates how his cheekbones are so prominent, just adding to his whole 'thin and withered' thing. He gives the mirror a particularly dark scowl, cotemplates brushing his teeth, then decides against it, instead succumbing to the ever-tempting siren call of the pack of cigarettes he always keeps in the drawer under his sink; his nicotine-laced mind is never sated. He can't quit, either. They're always just too ready to invite him to lose himself in the heavy, smoky scent and the assurance that it'll bring death closer.

Craig chuckles savagely, bitterly, as he remembers how Tricia used to berate him for not only smoking but doing it inside too. They'd always blow it up into a huge argument and pull whatever injustice life had given them into it as well. They had always ended when Tricia huffed, or screamed profain insults, or yelled and whirled into her room, slamming the door behind her with an explosive WHAM. Well, she doesn't anymore. There's no more casual flipping each other off. No more fighting, or banter, or stealing each others' shit. 

He'd always scream that he wished he never had a sister, just as she had cried that she wwanted to cast him out on the streets and never see him again, but neither of them actually wished for those tempermental, short lived fantasies to come to light. Not really, anyway. But that's the way life works, isn't it? You never get what you want until you do, but then you realize just how wrong, how horrible, you are for ever even thinking those things. For having fleeting desires as cruel and evil as erasing a loved one from the great, messy spider's web that is life.

The memory of whan can no longer be has Craig's eyes darting back up to the mirror, scrutinizing himself earnestly. Danger teases at the edges of the hard glare, and he is not smiling. Before even thinking, his hands are squeezed into almost-painful, white-knuckled fists, and his right arm is drawn back, wound up like a spring ready to pop out of a pen.

The mirror shatters.

A guttural scream is distressingly torn from the depths of his being, wretchedly filling an otherwise quiet house.

Craig's hand cruelly pounds out waves of hurt.

The pain skitters through it, trailing up his arm in relentlessly undulating throbs of regret and remorse; and it hurts to feel, but it's all he can do in thisphysically and emotionally hyper-sensitive state he seems to fluctuate in and out of constantly. It's all he can do to gasp the stale air of a dirty house and even dirtier conscious, willing himself to forget everything. Forget Trishia, forget the mirror, forget the fucking cigarettes that'll surely kill him one day.

For a third time in that span of five minutes, his eyes flit up to meet with his reflection.

Craig's met with someone he doesn't recognize. A monster. His cut-up and jagged face stares, no hundreds of faces stare, none of them fully fitting in to the intricately destroyed webs of the mirror's broken glass. It's like someone other than him, a different person each time, is watching through the mirror. They all have the same blue eyes; the same slightly parted and gasping mouth; the same terror and rage pulsing through their collective veins, beating together as one singular organism- the same monster.

He wants to know these other boys. Do they have the same terrible nightmares as they have the same mouth? Do they have the same nausea when in front of a large group of people as they have the same inky black hair? Do they have the same friend as they have the same dark blue sweater? Does their friend not touch or let anyone touch him, as Craig's does?

Craig desperately needs to know the answers; he wants to be confirmed by these people in the mirror that are as broken as he is. Maybe they can fix each other. So he tentatively reaches his hand out, the bruised and bloody knuckles a stark eyesore, and grazes his fingertips over the mirror. He wants to touch them, to see what it's like to be someone else. To get away from himself for a while.

Instead, a sharp, tiny pain slices over his fingers, causing him to recoil the hand and cradle it to his chest as if that was the worst injury it's been dealt that morning. And in a way, it is. His broken reflection gazes at him through the mirror, now with the smallest smattering of blood marking the dangerouldy tempting edge of a fragment. Those broken peices follow his every movement mockingly.

They just confirm everything he doesn't want. They assure that he's never going to escape from this body, this life. He can't. They jeer and tell him that to think he can is a fool's mistake. It'll never be someone else looking back at you, they taunt, and nobody's going to help you out, either. Why would they, when they have themselves to worry about too? No, it's always going to be just you, standing alone in a dingy bathroom; crying dry tears; wondering why, why, why does it have to be like this.

Craig shudders and leans his almost dangerously thin and gangly body on the cold, cold tile framing the shower door. He needs that dull distomfort pressing at the base of his skull, anchoring him to the here and now and not the distant lands of what if and if only that he seems to be getting lost in more and more these days.

He reaches up to pull a hand through his greasy hair, but as soon as he does, a sear of pain realizes itself and draws attention to his knuckles which basically scream the need for medical attention. Well, he certainly isn't a damn doctor, but he's taken care of both his and Tricia's (and before that, Clyde's, on occasion) bloody knuckles and fight wounds to know exactly what he's doing.

With practiced certainty, Craig pushes off the wall and ambles the two steps it takes to the sink, reaching again for the drawer. His fingers burn with the desire to grab the pack and smoke it all, but he schools himself to instead snatch the bottle of rubbing alcohol and gauze. It's depressing how familiar this all is to him, at this point; years of cuts, scrapes, gouges, wounds of all shape and size (self-inflicted or otherwise) have all been tended to in this room, by this same bottle of incredibly painful rubbing alcohol. It's almost empty now.

He swipes up a cotton ball from his pack of them, shoved to the corner of the couner where it meets the wall, and hates the way the crinkling plastic grates against his ears. When he finally soaks the cotton in alcohol and swipes it over the vulnerable, broken skin of his hand, Craig lets out a small cry of pain. It doesn't come out nearly as impressively as the all-out scream of earlier did. Really, it's pitiful, the way it just tumbles out and falls short; even its echoes in the empty silence of his bathroom are mockingly pathetic.

So he cleans the rest of his hand while biting back any noises of pain he's tempted to let out, for fear of his own weakness, and tightly wraps it in gauze. After a moment of consideration, he wraps the other hand up too. Maybe it'd look like he got into a fight and put some innocent kid in a hospital, rather than he punched his mirror in the solitude of his dirty, disgusting bathroom.

Craig pops each of the knuckles on his good hand, relishing the sickening crack of his own joints, before flexing his fingers into fists and stretching them out a few times, testing how the bandages feel around them. Not too bad. It's only then that he realizes how long he's taken in there and that he's probably going to be late to school. Not that he particularly cared, but he absolutaly dd not want to deal with his parents getting called in to school because he got too many tardy notices.

So Craig shoves the bandages and rubbing alcohol in the drawer, tugs on a pair of black skinny jeans that he found lying on the floor, crams his feet into a pair of ratty Converse that are way too small for him, and scoops up his backpack before flying down the stairs, slamming the door open, and beginning his mad dash to school.

The cigarettes stay forgotten on the sink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song:
> 
> Serotonin by Call Me Karizma  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh8-yISTkSI

**Author's Note:**

> Also, all chapter titles are song lyrics, and here's this chapter's song:
> 
> Congratulations, You Survived Your Suicide by Sycamore Smith  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4ptxPCnhuE


End file.
